Corentin Grenier

For me, I love the systemic workflows that we're going for because it means that I don't need to open three or four ships and do some little tweaks on those ships. It means we can do broad strokes on hundreds of ships all at once, ships that don't even exist yet. Without even opening that ship in the editor, we can create that content that then exists within the ship, and then we can move in to individual ships and add the little touches afterwards that elevate them to a level that we wouldn't have before. To use your example of the two different contexts you mentioned, it is both of those things, because it'll be: here's a huge block of content for procedural systems, and it's just, here's 50 loops that we need to make for maybe ambience. Or I've got a big block of content for impacts on me right now, and I can be making 200, 300 different little one-shots for things impacting the ship. And that takes a long time, but once it's in, unless we have a ship that's made of something else, maybe it's made of jelly, I don't then need to make new content, because reasonably all the ships are made of metal. So it's a good mix of: we're making changes that will persist across all ship entities, and then to take that to a higher level we'll be able to go and make those little touches and then improve ships one at a time.

To add to that, I would say even knowing how the system works and even helping design them as you're doing, I think it brings up the excitement of working on these systems. Because if you're told, okay, you have to make 200 sounds for this impact system, if you don't know what the system is, you're like, wow, this is 200 sounds, that's a lot. But when you know what the outcome will be, this gets more exciting and you know where you want to go. So I think this helps a lot when creating these massive asset banks for systems.

And we've seen that manifest as well. Just yesterday, we'd been working on thrusters and different vehicle systems. Corentin's started authoring thrusters for just one ship in the game, but it's a system that, after we throw the content on it, will persist across all ships by class, and then they'll have individual little touches on top to make them unique.

All ships that use thrusters from that manufacturer kind of thing?

Yeah, but then each individual ship will have its own thruster audio signature. We're looking at doing things with quantum travel exits. So when a ship arrives, say you're just floating through space and a really evil-looking ship comes out of quantum, you will hear a big impact as it finishes traveling. And it's somewhat akin to how you know what a TIE fighter sounds like when it's coming, and it's trouble. That's what we want to invoke with that. And I saw a quick demo from Corentin yesterday of the thrusters that we're currently working on, and we went through some feedback together on how that system's coming along, and versus what's in the game at the minute, it's a resounding difference. It sounds like you're bolted into the ship and each little movement that you make is meaningful. Even just watching it rather than playing the game itself, you feel like you're in that ship and it's really maneuver-happy, and it really elevates the experience.

So where did I start? After university, I had an audiovisual master's degree, then internship, the natural flow. I was doing a bit of everything. I worked on an audio fiction with binaural techniques and it was really cool. A few bits of sound design here and there, some VR as well. And then COVID happened and it was really hard to find a job at first. So I was working on my demo every day. It took me a while, but finally I landed a job here at CIG. I wanted to do games, and so I'm very happy now to be here.

How about you, Dan? Just give me the full CV.

Yeah, I started out in QA at TT Games. This was after university. I did my bachelor's and I was working at a bar at the time. So I spoke to a family friend who said, if you want to work in the industry... Because originally I wanted to be a recording engineer, like everyone that goes to audio university wants to be. They get in front of the desks and they think, this is me. When there were 60 people that all wanted to be music producers, I thought, well, we all can't be. So I thought, I'll try this out instead. So I spoke to a family friend who at the time worked at Evolution Studios in Runcorn, who I think are Codemasters now. He said, apply for a QA job in the industry. So I worked at TT Games for a while and then there was a requirement of extra audio staff for a game release. So I joined the team as a junior for a short time just for that game release and then was let go after that. But then I joined an indie studio as a composer and sound designer. So I was in charge of everything on the games. It was mobile and digital card games and that kind of thing. But that was really good in letting me be in charge of something, which was dangerous. I really enjoyed having that agency of: I come up with the solutions to the problems. I caused some problems along the way. And then COVID happened, so that gig kind of came to a close. I went self-employed. Started as a contractor at an audio outsource firm, worked for Supermassive Games on one of their last releases, The Quarry, which was great. I worked on dialogue for that. So it was all the PCAP data coming in, editing that in iZotope RX, and it was coming in from the shoot hot, like the day after, unedited. And then I just got it edited and it was back in game. So I touched all the dialogue in that game and it was a great experience, but it was contract work. So it came to a halt at one point, and then now I'm here.

It's this one, isn't it? So it's very good. No, really, it's not even lying. My first job, we can call that in audio, was my internship. Well, it was not in game audio necessarily, it was a bit of everything. But yeah, I had the chance to start as a technical sound designer straight away in an audio team. So I know that is very lucky. And luck is, whether you like it or not, a factor in getting into the games industry. There is hard work, but there is also a bit of luck. What is my job like? It's great because we are making a game. There is this feeling when you design your sound, it's like, oh yeah, that's nice, and then you put it into the game, and like, oh, when I shoot that weapon, it actually makes a sound. For me, it works every time. There is this excitement, this magic that happens every time you implement a sound and it sounds good, because sometimes it doesn't. But yeah, it's great, I love it.

I think working beneath Graham for you, especially in your first industry job... Graham's amazing at what he does, the code team all are. And I think being underneath that pillar of our audio code team for your first job is amazing. Not in a patronising way, like, didn't you do well? But that gets me excited for you in that way.

Oh, you're right, because I have a lot of freedom to do, not everything I want to do, of course, but I'm very free in my day-to-day job, so that's very good. I like it.

Yeah, that's still the case. We can start doing concepts early on. We only need very rough visuals. How fast does it go? Is it flying, hovering in the water? But we need it to be functional in order to actually work on it, because, as Dan said, the first steps are designing the outlines of what exactly it does. Then what does it sound like? And then my part comes in with: what do I have access to in terms of parameters, variables? Do I have access to the weight of the ship, not the ship, the boat tank? What are my inputs? And then I'm working with our amazing coder, Silvio, for him to give me access to these. Then I create all the framework in our software. And at the end, even if this is all ready, it's not hooked up to the game. So we need a working boat tank to actually try it for real.

We do work in parallel, hard to say. I'll start working on the... we have a middleware called Wwise, where we have all our sounds. I'll be working on that. At the same time, Dan is going to be working on, well, making the sounds. We'll make a list of exactly the sounds we need: how many loops, loops for this, loops for that, one-shots for this turret cannon. And then when everything's ready, I'll put everything into Wwise and we can try it in game, and hopefully it works.

I think it is worth noting as well, recently we didn't take over, but we were told to do a lot of the work on ships. It came into place around May time. We started doing designs and work from January, but we'd started designing six months earlier than that. We've tried to link with other teams, I think more successfully than we have before. We had meetings last year with the wider audio team, and we found that one of the biggest issues that we faced was visibility with the whole company and how we work, because in a lot of places we're a service team and we're working on content for parts of the game that other people have worked on. Obviously, we're a downstream team, but we wanted to get ahead of the curve in terms of what we're aware of, problems that we can detect early on. Nowadays, I'm much more integrated with the vehicle content team, whether they like that or not. I have a lot of meetings with John and Ben on every ship that's upcoming, vehicle concept meetings. Because of our component system, that really affects how the ship sounds when you're in it. That's localized, so that's in the control of the designer of the ship. But we have the ability to say having those components next to each other is a bit tricky from an audio standpoint. It's going to be annoying for the player. There's not going to be much that we can communicate to the player, because it is just noise when you put too many of them together. So part of the concept process now with ships is I can jump in and say, can that be shifted around a little bit? And that has happened already since May. I got a component moved because of that exact instance. Moving further upstream in terms of representation and presence has really helped us veto any problems that we might come into contact with later down the line, because we would have had to solve that mix issue with one bespoke fix for that ship. Whereas being able to say, oh, can you just move that over there a little bit? That would work much better for the player and for us as a department. That's really helped us be more understood upstream. And also, I don't think it was ever a case of we weren't thought about, but because we weren't present, we couldn't make any noise about what might affect us.

I would say this is actually what I'm doing right now with the new thruster system. So the story is we had to revamp the whole thruster stuff to make it more unified and more responsive. But the problem is Dan is a busy man and Dan is on all fronts at the same time. After designing the system, I needed content to have a good proof of concept. Dan wasn't available, so I just said, I'm just going to do some placeholder sounds, and I got carried away. And then I ended up designing pretty much a whole ship for the system, and I'm pretty happy with how it sounds. I got to do both parts, and I like how it sounds, and I think this is really going to be nice for players, I hope. That would be one thing I'm kind of proud of now.

There's plenty of things I'm not proud of, usually brought on by time constraints. I get a lot of flak online. By the way, I watch a lot of the content from our community, because I've recently become a father, so when I'm up at night, I need something to watch. So I tune into quite a lot of the content creators, Salty Mike, Morph, Super Mac Brother, because I need something on so I don't go insane at night. So I do want to learn about the project as much as I can, because I can't listen to every meeting that's in there. So a lot of the information I get about the game is from what the community hears. And the one thing I'm not proud of that gets a lot of attention is the Corsair rear door. Like you say about the Inception braaam before, that animation was finished very, very late before release and I had to get a sound in.

Was it finished or was it pushed out the door?

It was pushed out. I got the work the day or two before submission, and it just ended up sounding like some Transformers drivel. And I've promised myself that I'm going to fix that at some point, but I just haven't got time to yet. But the same one as Corentin really. It was only yesterday, but listening to it... It wasn't necessarily work that I've done much of, but we worked on the design together. We've helped steer it in the way that we want to. And hearing the change from the way ships sounded when we joined the company, because we got here probably a month apart, to how they currently sound on our computers was a really proud thing for me as well. Because it's a case of: this is where we were, and this is where we're up to already, and we're probably barely a quarter of the way through the work that we're doing on there. With the ability to tie into all the new control surface stuff and IFCS and all the new values that are offered up to us, we're really making great strides into immersive audio in vehicles that I haven't heard before in games. And it's really something to be proud of, I think. So I'm really glad to be working on what we're working on right now.

Of course not. They're the paying customers at the end of the day, they've got as much right to an opinion as anyone else. So they're the consumer. They are who we are working for, in terms of we want this product to be good so they can enjoy it and keep us in a job, keep us feeding our families. Doing work that they like is kind of the name of the game. If there's anything I've done that people like, I appreciate your kind words. If there's anything I've done that people don't like, it'll get fixed at some point, maybe. But being in games, it's a weird job to be in, because people can have an opinion a lot of the time and there's just not much you can do about it sometimes. So it's a weird one, and everyone does have an opinion, whether it's a man in the pub that plays mobile games. When he asks you what you're doing, you say, oh, I work in video games. He's, oh, I don't know about them video games. And then he tells you about his high score on Flappy Bird or something. But it's great to be able to make a game that so many people enjoy, and I hope that people continue to enjoy it in the future.

I don't want to say everything you just said again, because I share your opinion. The thing is, audio is very often not commented on that much. You ask someone, oh, how was the sound of this game? Oh yeah, the music was good. Yes, but how's the sound? Did you listen to the sound? So when audio gets attention, usually it's good. I see a lot of comments, very kind comments regarding audio. So I really appreciate that. And I think the things that are good should be addressed, and for the things that are bad, feel free to comment as well, because we need to fix it. And we really are trying to make sure that all the new experiences we are crafting are going to be in the hands of the players the soonest, TM. We are really trying to go as fast as possible, because we also want the game to sound great. Even just playing the game on our own machines, we like playing games when they have good sound.

Yeah, well, we'll talk a little bit later about how Corentin's going to be looking at the flight experience from an audio perspective, and this is another angle on that, and we have to make the ships work in a way that sounds good in all circumstances, and this is a very unique circumstance, but it looks absolutely beautiful, and I certainly can't wait till we get our hands on it and start tuning the audio experience to it as well.

I do agree, it's going to be a really cool piece of work to work on.

What's important to mention also is these tracks, you'll be able to race them at night also. We have amazing lighting artists that did some amazing work on these tracks. So whether you're racing at daytime or nighttime, the experience is going to be different, but I love to see these tracks, the way they're lit up at night, especially the landmark on this one with the fire on top, it looks great. One other thing to know is we did hide some Easter eggs. Some are going to be easy to find, others are going to be harder to find because the tracks are so big. We did place a few podiums around the tracks in key locations where we have some nice shots for print screens. So it's going to be up to the players to find those podiums. There's between one and three podiums hidden per track. So good luck finding them.

Yeah, really great stuff, the races. So what I think now is players can be in different contexts. And races will be a big context, and it needs to have that little thing in addition to the normal flight, maybe to really make it more cinematic. Really giving the player the feel of speed and danger, maybe, because you can crash of course. So that's really something you have to consider when working on the different contexts players can be in.

Yeah, for a game as huge as Star Citizen, we have a lot of contexts to deal with, and we try to come up with as many systemic solutions as possible so that things just work, and people can throw features into the game that we don't even know about and they just work from an audio perspective. But something like racing is a unique thing where what you're interested in is all happening very much in the cockpit and in that narrow path ahead of you. And systemic solutions don't really focus on that quite so much. So giving Corentin and his team some tools to allow us to exaggerate those things.